Monthly Archives: November 2010

Creating innovative TV commercials is more effective when using patterns embedded in other innovative commercials. Professor Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues discovered that 89% of 200 award winning ads fall into a few simple, well-defined design structures. Their latest book, Cracking the Ad Code, defines eight of these structures and provides a step-by-step approach to use them. Here are the ...

12 Signs Innovation is Alive and Kicking in Your Culture by Drew Marshall What are tells? A tell is an unwitting signal made by a player in a poker game. It is any clue, habit, behavior, or physical reaction that gives other players more information about your hand. Organizations have tells, too, signs, patterns, and behaviors that indicate what is ...

Here’s a sketch that I came up with last week that helps explain how organizations get better at innovation: This is a bit of a distillation of observations over time. I thought of it because I think that a lot of people that are trying to improve innovation within an organization think that they can go from the bottom left ...

1. “If you can dream it, you can do it.” – Walt Disney 2. “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, and magic and power in it. Begin it now.” – Goethe 3. “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that ...

We Should Develop Our Skills at Divergent and Convergent Thinking by Paul Sloane We are creatures of habit. Each day we wake up on same side of the bed. We put on the same type of clothes we wore the previous day, we eat the same type of breakfast, we sit in the same car and we take the same ...

Simple in Front, Complex in Back by Hutch Carpenter On a LinkedIn discussion, someone asked: “Structured or un-structured innovation. Which works better?” There are a number of ways that could be answered. I look at it this way: What’s the simplest structure you can live with? I’m focusing on the application of simplicity as much possible in the innovation process. ...

Of all the changes that have occurred in basketball over the past 120 years since James Naismith invented the game, which is considered the game’s most important? The dunk? The shot-clock? The Laker-girls? All significant…but this particular change could also be considered one of basketball’s true innovations – a game changer that revolutionized the game so dramatically that the previous ...

I’ve been talking lately about the Age of Now. We’re living in a time of electronic instant everything, constant updates, limitless choices and channels. According to a new paper by Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert just published in the journal Science, there’s a reason why people strive to live in the moment. Simply, it makes us happier. The ...

Well, we’ve just been through quite an election – out with the ‘old’, in with the new – well, somewhat, there were several incumbents re-elected. This isn’t a mandate for or against either party; it was a mandate for an economic revolution to get rid of big government and make one that works for the people. Is the government capable ...

I saw an article recently, highlighted by Richard Florida, that suggested that the incoming Republican-led House of Representatives will reduce spending on scientific research. The natural conclusion from that assertion was that therefore, there would be less funding for “innovation”. It’s interesting to consider how funding for basic R&D within government labs impacts innovation, and what role we want the ...